Roughly seven weeks from the first public beta release and just over two weeks from the second public beta, Sling Media has released SlingPlayer for Windows 2.0. Go forth and download.
Disclaimer: I’m employed by Sling Media.
According to TWICE, Digeo is working on two Moxi cable DVRs. The first will be distributed through Charter later this month, to also be followed by ‘a second MSO’. It’s only four months after they announced this the first time. Back in May at The Cable Show Digeo announced that Charter would carry the Moxi 3012 HD DVR by the end of 3Q08. So they have less than two weeks to meet that goal.
Of course, back in January Digeo’s then COO, now President, Greg Gudorf told me that their cable DVR would ship by the end of 1Q08. So we’ll see how this roll out goes.
The other Moxi DVR will be a CableCARD consumer product sold at retail and expected to ship in January. That will be a year after Digeo suddenly canceled all of their planned consumer products, just days after showing them at CES and talking up the launch plans.
Details on the consumer product are thin, I’m presuming they’ll have something to say about it at CES in January. Of course, they did last year too. Unsurprisingly it will be a CableCARD-enabled DVR, and it will not be tru2way-enabled. It sounds like they’re pitching all the same features they were on the canceled products - music and photo access, content partners, home control integration, etc. For music content Digeo has lined up FineTune, Rhapsody and Sirius and they have Flickr for photos.
The one new item that I found interesting is that they’re implementing DLNA support. I’d like to see more products supporting DLNA, standards are good and DLNA has growing support across a number of products such as the Xbox 360, PS3, HP Media Smart TVs, Blu-ray players, etc.
Digeo is also apparently still working on their Moxi TV for PC software, which I was told was in beta and close to release at CES 2008 in January. Though according to TWICE they have it running on XP, Vista, and Media Center versions of Windows now, and not just XP as at CES. No word on when it might be available to consumers.
Gudorf told TWICE that Digeo is working on future products for post-July 2009 which will support tru2way. Digeo signed the tru2way accord in June. But I’m not even going to devote any mental energy to that until Digeo manages to ship something to consumers.
Digeo started talking about launching new consumer products two years ago, in September 2006. (Which I picked up, amusingly enough, from an article in TWICE.) I talked to them at CES 2007 where they were showing mock ups and no real products with the promise of shipping later in the year.
They insisted they’d ship in time for the 2007 holidays up through September. (Oddly enough, another article from TWICE. Is covering Digeo a September tradition for them?) Then in November they admitted they weren’t going to ship in 2007.
Then I talked to them again at CES 2008, and they were showing off some of the same mock-ups they’d had at CES 2007, as well as some actual products. Just a week later they canceled the products and laid off nearly half of their staff. Digeo’s Gary Gudorf talked to me the next day to offer clarifications, including that their cable MSO product would ship by the end of 1Q08, which it didn’t.
We didn’t hear anything else until April when details on the cable product emerged. And then in May they exhibited at The Cable Show and issued a press release announcing Charter’s intention to carry it. In June Digeo signed the tru2way accord.
And now here we are in September again, two years after they first announced their intention to enter the consumer DVR market, and they’re promising a box ‘expected to ship in January’. You’ll pardon me if I don’t hold my breath. Assuming they do exhibit at CES in January, I’ll check out their offerings, again. As I said when I covered them this year, I think they have some good design points. But none of it matters until they manage to get a box on retail shelves.
I hear it’ll come bundled with Duke Nukem Forever.
Tipped off by EngadgetHD.
EDIT: This got some attention in AVS Forum, including from a Charter rep, who wasn’t encouraging:
Ironically yesterday I got whispers from a contact in St Louis who works with someone who’s got a beta 3012 (Don’t get hopes up, so far it seems only a few elite managers and tech ops people in St Louis have gotten to beta this unit)
Apparently it’s still got quite a few bugs, which I think is very odd, given really all they needed to do was improve on the existing hardware and leave the software alone.
At any rate I don’t expect to see them in 2 weeks, heck at the rate things are going, I’d consider us lucky if we see them before Q3 2009
I’d say I’m surprised or that this is unusual so close to a planned release - but frankly this is what I’ve come to expect from Digeo. They’ve had one product actually make it to market, the BMC9000 STB series from Motorola running the Moxi software. But that launched back in 2004 and has been out of production for a long time now. At its peak it only reached around 400,000 users, and the number of Moxi uses is believed to be much smaller now as units have been replaced with newer, non-Moxi DVR models. Unsurprisingly the main MSO to use Moxi was Charter, which, like Digeo, is controlled by Paul Allen. But even with it being ‘in the family’ Charter’s use of Moxi was minor.
Moxi’s history since they were acquired by Digeo has been one of failed execution. Early on Moxi was on their way to being a competitor in the consumer DVR space and they had some cutting edge plans, then Digeo acquired them and refocused them on cable MSOs instead of retail. Digeo acquired Moxi way back in 2002 - and in six years what have they done? One product which never achieved more than minor market penetration, and is now well out of date and discontinued. Aside from that they have a history of press releases and announced partnerships, awards won for products announced but never shipped, staff layoffs, and repeated product delays and cancellations. If they didn’t have Paul Allen backing them I don’t see how they’d still be in business. Digeo needs to ship a product, a good product, to significant numbers of users, if they want to earn consumer trust again.
As I mentioned last month GeekBrief.TV had stopped updating on TiVoCast sometime in early July. It had been one of my favorite TiVoCasts since it was added last November, so I missed it.
Well, I got a pleasant surprise today when GeekBrief.TV showed up in my Now Playing List. Nice to see that whatever the problem was it has finally been resolved.
On the not-so-nice side, I signed up for the new 3 Minute Ad Age TiVoCast and got deluged. Ten episodes downloaded (I set mine to Keep At Most 10), I watched and deleted them - and ten more came in. I watched and deleted those. And ten more came in. All told I think thirty episodes came in. It looks like they went live with a backlog and they were all marked as new. So beware.
And on a different note, after my laptop post last week I finally pulled the trigger and bought a new one. Why? I found a coupon for $500 off good through 9/22. That was about 1/3 off, too good to pass up.
Lifehacker has an article today about a TiVo tool called KMTTG. KMTTG, which apparently stands for Kevin Moye (the author) TiVoToGo, is a Perl/Tk program that… well, I’ll let Kevin explain it:
kmttg is a Perl/Tk program I wrote to facilitate TivoToGo (TTG) transfers that can download, create metadata, decrypt, run comskip & comcut (commercial detection and removal) and re-encode multiple shows you select from your Tivos all in 1 step. The program also has the capability to transfer and process shows automatically from your Tivos based on titles and keywords you setup.
In slightly less geeky speak that means kmttg can download content from your TiVo via TiVoToGo. Parse out the program information and description, the metadata, and save it. Decrypt the TiVoToGo .tivo file into a standard MPEG-2 file. Run an application called ‘comskip’ which analyzes the video and marks where it believes the commercial breaks are. Then call ‘comcut’ which takes the information comskip provided and removes the commercial breaks from the video. And finally it can then take that video and transcode it into other formats, such as H.264 for your portable device.
Now, it doesn’t do all of this itself. In fact kmttg is really a wrapper of scripts written in Perl with a user interface written in Tk which automates and abstracts several other applications such as curl, TiVoDecode, mencoder, ffmpeg, comskip, etc. So you could do all of these steps manually and individually, but kmttg makes it much simpler and easier.
Installing and using kmttg is probably not for the technophobe. You need to have Perl and Tk installed on your system, and neither is standard on Windows. You’ll need to install a Perl distribution, such as ActiveState ActivePerl, and possible manually install Tk as well. kmttg is available for Windows and Linux, though since it is Perl and the prerequisites, or their equivalents, exist for Mac I bet a technically savvy Mac user could produce a working Mac version as well. Going by the kmttg discussion thread at TiVoCommunity, it looks like it has been tried.
kmttg looks like a nice tool for those who want to extract video from their TiVo and use it elsewhere. It is a free alternative to TiVo Desktop Plus on Windows, and it has features like commercial removal which TDP lacks.
If you have, or know of, a TiVo-related application I’ve missed, let me know.
Last night Sling Media released updated the SlingPlayer for Windows 2.0 Public Beta with the release of the second beta build. The new build, .457, replaces the first beta build, .447, and can be downloaded from the Sling Media website. (Also for Canada.) Users who had previously installed Public Beta 1 will be prompted to auto-update SlingPlayer to the new beta build.
Disclaimer: I work for Sling Media as a Beta Manager.
Pop quiz time!
Hypothetically, given that someone was considering buying this laptop:
1. Would you recommend another laptop with similar specifications instead? Consider as constraints that a screen resolution of 1680×1050 is considered a minimum requirement, the physical dimensions should be similar and certainly not much larger, Blu-ray support is desired, and, while not a requirement, AMD is favored. A lower price is always a plus.
2. Bonus essay - justify your answer to #1.
3. Extra credit - try to convince this person to consider a Mac. 
Early DirecTV receivers had serial ports which allowed TiVo, ReplayTV, and other DVRs to control them without using IR blasters. Serial provides a more reliable control connection as there is no chance of interference or having the IR emitters moved while cleaning, etc. And it offers a bidirectional communication channel so the DVR can confirm the change. But later model DirecTV receivers dropped the serial port, forcing users of third party DVRs to use IR blasters.
I just became aware of another solution. Paterson Technologies offers a serial to USB adapter which allows users of TiVo, ReplayTV, ShowStopper, BeyondTV, SageTV, MythTV, and Windows Media Center to control the DirecTV model D11, D12, H20, H21, H32, HR20, and HR21 receivers. It is more than just a simple serial to USB cable, there is some intelligence built in such as the ability to map channels so you can have your DVR, say, tuning channel ‘4′ and the satellite receiver actually being tuned to channel 4-1 for OTA ATSC. You can configure it by connecting the adapter to a PC.
It isn’t a cheap option at $42, but for those using 3rd party DVRs with newer DirecTV receivers it may be worth it for the reliability of serial over IR, and the channel mapping abilities. You can check it out for yourself.
According to this post at The Green Button by Charlie Nilsson, Program Manager for Microsoft eHome Division, Microsoft is working on support for the Tuning Adapter in Windows Media Center to allow MCPC users to handle Switched Digital Video. The Tuning Adapters were approved by CableLabs in July and TiVo has already deployed support. Since the TAs are USB devices, it might seem like PCs would be amongst the first platforms to support them. However, it sounds like it may be a while yet:
Microsoft recognizes the impact of this technology on our customers and partners. We are working to enable support for the CableLabs SDV Tuning Adaptor for Windows Media Center Digital Cable Tuners, ensuring that Windows Media Center users will be able to access switched content.
While we have no further details at this time, we will keep you updated as more information becomes available.
While it is good news that MCPC users will be getting SDV support, I’m sure the users with cable systems using SDV would like to see it sooner rather than later.